Monitoring your Magento / Joomla! bridge

MageBridge connects Magento with Joomla!, enabling enterprise e-commerce features in your favorite Joomla! CMS. When shit hits the fan though, Magento errors might occur (because you accidently modified the production environment, shudder?) and the bridge might go offline. Orders stop and income drops. To make sure you are notified in time, the MageBridge Watchfulli plugin allows for Watchfulli to continuously monitor the health of the bridge.

When the bridge goes offline, you will be notified. Also the plugin does some extra health checks, like matching the MageBridge version in Joomla! with the MageBridge version in Magento. In general, when these two versions do not match, features implemented on one side might not yet have been implemented on the other side - that's why we always recommend to keep all MageBridge versions in sync. The Watchfulli plugin makes it easier to guarantee this.

Pending work on other Watchfulli plugins

We are also working on a Dynamic404 plugin for Watchfulli, which simply checks whether the Dynamic404 System Plugin is enabled and whether the cores Redirect System Plugin is disabled (which would otherwise conflict with the Dynamic404 plugin). It is less useful, because there is no notification when something actually fails. We have been thinking about sending notifications when a 404-error occurs, but this will definitely generate more spam than you can handle.

These exercices have proven us the power of Watchfulli though. It requires little work to create a custom plugin for the service, and once you have a good purpose (like monitoring change X or failure Y) it is definitely a powertool for sysops. We like it.